At our meeting in January - during which we again brought together the faculty members from the main campus and three (of the five) extended sites, we introduced the idea of doing observations by video.
We used this video of a math classroom (it was chosen at the last minute for convenience, not because it represents anything great). initially, I asked everyone to share something that they would like the rest of us to observe (as if they themselves were the ones in the video). We watched for five minutes, and then shared our impressions - emphasizing that observations that were outside the scope of what we ourselves suggested were not appropriate.
Then we watched another five minutes of the video, but this time i prefaced it by asking the assembled faculty to focus on the question: "how does the instructor know that the students have learned what she's teaching them?" This spurred lots of interesting discussion, which hopefully will continue as we muster the technological resources to do this with ourselves.
We used this video of a math classroom (it was chosen at the last minute for convenience, not because it represents anything great). initially, I asked everyone to share something that they would like the rest of us to observe (as if they themselves were the ones in the video). We watched for five minutes, and then shared our impressions - emphasizing that observations that were outside the scope of what we ourselves suggested were not appropriate.
Then we watched another five minutes of the video, but this time i prefaced it by asking the assembled faculty to focus on the question: "how does the instructor know that the students have learned what she's teaching them?" This spurred lots of interesting discussion, which hopefully will continue as we muster the technological resources to do this with ourselves.